FINALLY, an update here, and yes I know, regular updating. Well, turns out coursework season is still in full swing. Hell I'm supposed to be doing a 1000 word Creative Writing piece RIGHT NOW, but this was bugging me and I wanted it to be done. Besides, I KNOW most of you are feeling the same pressure. I swear, schools all over the world agree to make Christmas time into Coursework time just to bug us.
So yeah, read and enjoy yo!
Zim blinked his eyes open slowly, the world seemed fuzzy and strange around him. His head hurt an awful lot and there was an ongoing pulse along his spine stemming from his PAK. He tried to remember where he was, but found he couldn't. There was a weird kind of... jump in his memory, like watching a film with a big scene cut out the middle and hastily pasted back together.
It hurt way too much to think right now. Why didn't he bring any headache pills?
Well, wherever he was it was kind of comfortable. He was certainly lying in a bed, that was for sure. He got up slowly, forcing his body, which protested by aching like crazy, and taking a proper look around the room.
Rule one of being an invader, know your surroundings!
It took a moment of dazed, half-lidded looking about to realise it was a bedroom. He had been laying on a bed, hence why he was so comfortable. The room looked... weirdly familiar. Glowing little stars on the ceiling, paranormal stuff everywhere.
He knew... that he knew it. He knew he had been to this place before. But when? Why? Who did this room even belong too? It certainly wasn't his because he'd never decorate his room in this ugly blue colour.
A name was fighting through, Derp, durp... DIB.
Now everything came swinging back into his mind, memories smashing together like high speed cards, merging in a chaos of noise and images. His head pounded and a pained sound escaped his throat. He held his head in his hands, wishing the pain would get out of his skull.
Finally the pain subsided, though not completely. He knew however he could not stay in this room, otherwise Dib would be sure to come and try and cut him open or something horrible. That boy was sadistic like that.
He couldn't remember where this place though. He knew it was Dib's house, yes, but... where was Dib's house again? Ugh, this was going to drive him crazy. Well, still, he was an invader and invaders knew how to go about conquering their environments.
Zim went to move off the bed, but almost stumbled and not just from the pain his body felt. Was he... taller? He didn't remember this happening, since when was he this tall? Well, he liked it. He then noticed he was wearing a loose t-shirt and some lose fitting pyjama pants. They both had UFO's all over them.
He scowled, that was probably Dib's idea of a joke.
He suddenly noticed that his skin was... burned? He blinked in shock. It wasn't the easily healed acid burns like when he was caught out in the rain without coat of paste. This was burned like he'd been in an oven, though it was in patches all over him. They would take much longer to heal and this thought made him growl.
Okay, he knew he had lost his memory, or at least, large parts of it. At least he knew his name and his location... kind of. He could just call in Gir to come and get him and everything should be fine.
He went to open his PAK up and call for back up when a thought hit him. He was in Dib's house... in his room... he could really mess a bunch of stuff up here! Maybe even destroy some of his annoying computers!
Plus it would be kind of humiliating for him to go home and fill in his report to the Tallest while wearing his arch enemies pyjamas. Who knows what they might think?
Zim slowly and shakily moved towards the door of the room, hoping that he was still strong enough to fight back if Dib tried to jump him. Amazingly, his enemy wasn't there. In fact, by the sound of it, the home was empty.
He could hear cars hushing past outside and from somewhere deep under the house, the hum of massive machines working in Professor Membranes lab. Zim moved quietly, his instinct taking over, something that no amount of memory deletion could ever do.
Where would Dib take his clothes if he stole them? He would probably hide them in a place Zim would hate... like the washing machine.
The alien paled. This was going to be painful.
He began stepping slowly down the stairs, each step careful and cat-like, as if any moment he expected Dib to come jumping out behind him and try and take his guts out.
However, the house remained still. Zim didn't like things being still, it spooked him out. He was too used to the noise of his own home, which never seemed to have a peaceful moment. Zim knew he was just being paranoid but he considered it a well placed paranoia. He had obviously lost a lot of memory, ugh, which meant he'd have to probably spend a week trying to regain all those lost memories from a backup or something.
... if he had any. When did he last back up his PAK?
He froze at the bottom of the staircase, blinking. It had been... years since he'd backed up his PAK. It'd become such a bothersome thing, and Earth so far out of reach from the mass Control Brain Cloud that it was almost impossible to get a proper connection.
Zim pushed away that horrible pit in his stomach, he would worry about it later. Right now his main priority was getting out of here.
There was a sudden noise however from a room down a hall that Zim rarely went down. He blinked before looking around and throwing himself behind a couch, almost screaming in pain at the effort and at the feeling of his burnt skin hitting the floor, however, he bit down on his lip and managed to hold his pain in.
Zim could only watch under the couch as a door opened and began walking through the house. Those weren't Dib feet... he looked up at the top of the couch and saw a bob of purple hair moving along the top before walking to the stairs.
He crawled up onto the couch very slowly, wanting to get a better look at this strange thing moving through Dib's home. Something in his head tingled slowly, like... he knew her? There was certainly something about her that seemed so familiar and he couldn't place it.
Why couldn't he take his eyes from her? He was practically perched on the armchair of the couch now, watching her carry something upstairs.
Wait, he knew those colours... "Those are my clothes!"
The girl seemed to jump, clearly she had no idea the irken had been there. Her head turned and she looked to him with wide, yet cold, amber eyes which upon seeing Zim, flashed with something much warmer. "Zim!"
"Gaz!" The name seemed to come from somewhere other than his head, it came from somewhere deeper inside him. His head suddenly exploded in pain again as memories began smashing back into him, causing him to scream and fall back on the couch.
Gaz saw this and immediately began panicking and dropped the clothes to rush over to Zim. To say she was shocked was something of an understatement. What the heck was he doing downstairs? And furthermore, why had he been spying on her instead of saying something the moment she came into the room?
Zim's thrashing began to die down, leaving him in a sort of limp, groaning state. Gaz however only just now realised that as he had been in pain, she had grabbed his hand... tightly. She fought away an ashamed blush and let go, standing back a little to give him, and perhaps herself, a little breathing room.
"Are you alright?" She asked quickly, allowing an annoyed tone to enter her voice, "What are you doing out of bed?"
Zim didn't answer. There were... confused memories in his head. He remembered her as a child, that bratty, horrible little girl who would cause pain to anyone who ever looked at her the wrong way. He hadn't looked twice at her back then, but other memories were trying to but in. She had hurt him badly at one point, when Dib was ill, he was sure of that. But everything else from that point was... blank. He had flashes of her talking to him, something about clothes? It hurt his head to think about it.
All he could think about was the pain this girl had inflicted on him, even saying her name had caused him to collapse. By all rights he should hate her with everything he had.
And yet, he found himself so draw to her that her presence beside him was comforting to him. He knew she was connected with why he was here, why he was covered in burns and felt like he'd been hit with the Massive. But even so, he could not stop feeling this... strange connection to her, this odd achy feeling inside him where his heart would be. It was on fire and to look at her made him want to spend every second he had with her. He couldn't explain it, it was like nothing he had ever felt before yet he knew that this was not something he was feeling now. This was something that was there before he had lost his memory... he just wished he knew what to call it.
"Gaz." He said the name again, as if trying to make himself remember more, but it didn't happen. Instead he decided to get some questions out the way, at least before Dib got back from wherever he had gone. "What happened? Why am I here, tell Zim!"
"... don't you remember?" Gaz asked with a somewhat curious tone. "You were hit by lightning."
"Lightning?" Zim almost leapt up at that, but his body shouted at him, so he only managed to sit up and lean back on the couch. "No wonder I'm hurt... and my PAK..."
"It's your fault for walking out into the rain like that." Gaz continued to scold, not really knowing how to show sympathy having never shown sympathy before. "You shouldn't have come looking for me."
Zim blinked at this, putting a hand to his aching head. "I did what? When?"
"Don't you remember?" Gaz was starting to get worried now, Zim wasn't acting like himself. He seemed confused and almost weak, she was too used to seeing him be loud and annoying, but she was also rather unused to him being able to look her in the eye, even when sitting down. "I, erm, went out to see if you were okay," Saying it out loud like that made her realise what kind of action it was and what it would heavily imply to anyone listening in, "And you went out to find me in the storm, then we met under a tree and you were hit by lightning." She decided to skip over the bit about what she was about to say to say to him. That could be left for later when she didn't feel so silently humiliated for a moment of emotional weakness.
Zim nodded at this. He didn't think she was lying, he trusted her for a reason he couldn't explain. However, he still didn't recall any of this and he knew he never would. His memory of the event had been deleted, as had so many others.
"So... do you remember me? I mean, during these past couple of weeks?" Gaz had to ask, her curiosity was killing her. Besides, if he had forgotten, it could ruin all that she had done for him and all he'd done for himself.
Zim shook his head, and Gaz's heart fell. "Not a thing. Not since... we had a fight in school. Hey, have I gotten taller? I feel taller." He stood up and grinned. "Zim is TALL!"
Gaz however was not impressed, rather, she felt terrible. So all of that building, all the time together, it had been lost. Zim was more likely stupider now than he was before and his fascination with his tallness and how easily he seemed to be taking his memory loss.
The teenager got up stiffly and began storming out the room, refusing to even make a sound. He would not allow to make her to feel this way. He would not be allowed to utterly humiliate her.
"Where are you going?" Zim suddenly asked.
"To my room." Gaz replied as he began stomping up the stairs. "Don't bother following me!"
Zim looked on at this, blinking. He wanted to call out to her, to tell her his weird fiery feeling inside which only seem to intensify as she vanished from view. He wasn't foolish enough not to recognise this feeling. He was missing Gaz... and now he was even more confused.
This was clearly going to be a very long day.
WOO, edited ending there because the original was terrible. BUT YES, what will happen to Gaz and Zim? Will Gaz ever just man up and tell Zim how she feels? Will Zim stop being an idiot and realise he actually feels something for someone? Where the heck is Dib?
All questions shall be answered next chapter, broskis.
Unfortunately no references this week, though 'Control Brain Cloud' is my little jab at Itunes cloud. It works so well, doesn't it? NOT WHEN YOU CAN'T GET A CONNECTION.
Anyways, hope you all liked this, review, tell me what you think, and I'll see you all next time! Also, next chapter will have DIBITON in it. Everyone likes Dibiton.